I knew him….

‘Someone must have traduced Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.’

What we have just done to Justice Lasry defies both belief and all decency.

Yes, we have dreadful problems in the way we dispose of cases in our courts, but reacting in anything like this way can only dint confidence in our judges even further. 

And make it harder for them to do their job, and for us to get the best people.  Why accept a position where you are accorded the dignity and respect not of a figure out of Franz Kafka, but of a Commissar in a novel by Boris Pasternak?

I have some experience of these things.  Good judges don’t run scared.  Nor should any judge be seen to owe fealty to the civil service of the government.

There is something rotten in the State of Victoria.

Romeo and Juliet is a play about a tragedy brought about by the meeting of two rivers – the cyclical hate and killing of the blood feud, or vendetta, and the loss of judgment than can afflict teenagers when they first feel hot passion.  One is a force for life; the other a force for death.  Both involve heat.  And in that part of the world that brought us Boccaccio and Petrarch, and the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and the Mafia, neither was in short supply.

The great American judge and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said that ‘the Roman law started from the blood feud, and all the authorities agree that the German law began in that way.’  The phrase ‘German law’ there means our law, since English law grew not from Roman law, but from the laws of the Angles and Saxons.  The compact OED has for vendetta ‘1 a prolonged bitter quarrel with or complaint against someone 2 a prolonged feud between families in which people are murdered in revenge for previous murders.’  That fits the Capulets and Montagues.  The problem about breaking the cycle had been looked at two thousand years before in the Oresteia.

Sex is, well, sex.  We would cease to exist without it, but all hell can break loose in that period described as puberty – which is where the thirteen-year-old Juliet, still minded by her nurse, finds herself.

When those two currents meet, you may get mayhem – of precisely the kind described in this play.  We learn immediately of ‘ancient grudge’ and ‘new mutiny,’ where ‘civil blood makes civil hands unclean,’ so that ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’ – and these ‘misadventured piteous overthrows….with their death bury their parents’ strife’. 

How else could that strife end? 

There are three key words in the lexicon of those in a blood feud – respect, insult, and honour.  You may recall the scene in Godfather III when one Mafia don quits a meeting hissing that the Godfather has not shown him enough respect – and then all hell break loose, and the building is raked with machine gun fire.

At the start of the play, Romeo thinks he’s in love with Rosaline.  That she is a Capulet does not appear to trouble him.  He’s more worried about what usually troubles boys – her commitment to ‘chastity’ (1 1 213 and 221).  His mate Benvolio suggests they gatecrash a Capulet party so that Romeo can compare Rosaline with other young women (and as we know, with one look at Juliet, Rosaline goes clean out the window).  The Montagues know this will be seen as a mortal insult by the Capulets.  They will go masked – like the trio in Don Giovanni – but Romeo knows this is not a good idea – his mind misgives (1.4.47 and 106).  Such is the rashness, and price, of the young male ego.  Another mate, Mercutio, who has about him a kind of death wish, launches into a speech about nothing, and the troop marches on – and in.

Inevitably, they are sprung, and by the Capulet point man, a very nasty piece of work called Tybalt, who immediately calls for his rapier to answer this ‘scorn at our solemnity’ (1.5.59 and 65).  Capulet talks him out of it at the party, but Tybalt is not satisfied.  He serves a written challenge on Montague. 

So, when the day is hot, and the Capulets are abroad, and the ‘mad blood’ is stirring, Benvolio knows a brawl is inevitable and suggests to Mercutio that they retire (3.1.1-4).  But Mercutio is as hot for a fight as Tybalt, and you know the rest.

This happens while Romeo meets, falls for, and marries Juliet in some of the most gorgeous and best-known language in our letters. 

In the result, we may overlook that within a couple of days, Romeo has killed two people, the first a Capulet, the other a relative of the prince who was scheduled to marry Juliet, and who appears to have been beyond a reproach for a young noble of that time.

Romeo kills twice in hot blood, but that was not a legal excuse then – it flouted the edict of the prince – and it was only a moral excuse if you subscribed to the law of the vendetta.  Romeo did not do so – he had seen it all before and he had had enough (1.1 174-186).  His first killing, Tybalt, is the vendetta tit for tat, pure and simple.

He kills Paris when mad with grief and bent on suicide – but only suicide in stage-mannered way.  Paris had every right to arrest Romeo as a felon – if not a ghoul – but the crazed Romeo can only respond ‘Wilt thou provoke me?  Then, have at me, boy!’  The insults flow in even in death found in heat.  (‘Boy’ was the final insult in Coriolanus.)  Then Romeo sees who he has killed and recalls that his servant had told him that ‘Paris should have married Juliet’ and he says that he will bury Paris ‘in a triumphant grave’(5.3.78 and 83) – whatever that means.  He even comes to terms with Tybalt.

Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet?
O, what more favour can I do to thee,
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin!   (5.3.97-101).

It is almost Wagnerian, but it does not strike us like that.  We are wrung out – and in less than half of five hours.  We find it easier to come to grips with the youth of Juliet than that of Romeo – in practice, it is the other way around.  Girls mature faster than boys.  The difference here is I suppose, that when it became for the killing, it was the boys who went for their rapiers.  The vendetta was male thing.

Such is the power of the playwright, that it does not occur to us that had our hero not killed himself, he may have faced two counts of murder – even putting to one side the edict of his ‘moved prince’ and the ineluctable force of the vendetta.  All we know is:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe.
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

If the producers of the Arkangel set of the complete plays of Shakespeare had set out to show The Merchant of Venice as the worst play ever written, they have succeeded.  The problem is not so much Shylock, as the boring ordinariness and vanity of the rest of them.  And W H Auden in his Lectures on Shakespeare does not help.  He says ‘The only racial remark in the play is made by Shylock, and the Christians refute it.  Religious differences in the play are treated frivolously: the question is not one of belief, but conformity.’  That is a false dilemma, and the whole play is riddled with expressions of contempt going both ways – and taking a pound of flesh by due process of law does not sound ‘frivolous’.

There is no doubt that Auden was very seriously bright.  I at first thought he could have made a brilliant advocate.  The lectures are full of lightning flashes.  But too often, the lightning hits the dunny.  And that is fatal in advocacy. 

And if he expressed his views on Desdemona to a modern U S audience now, they would burn the place down.

But here he is on the fall of Rome as shown in Julius Caesar.

It was a society doomed not by the evil passions of selfish individuals, because such passions always exist, but by an intellectual and spiritual failure of nerve that made the society incapable of coping with its situation, which is why the noble Brutus is even more at sea in the play than the unscrupulous and brutal Antony.

A failure of nerve led to the collapse of Europe in the 1930s, and threatens the U S now. 

After the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, Antony’s funeral oration is probably the best-known speech in Shakespeare.  Antony is utterly unscrupulous, and the results are utterly brutal.  The two subsequent scenes in that play are in my view the best displays of just how vicious politics can get on our stage.  The first scene is a lynching.  The second is a Mafia like settlement of the death list compiled in the coldest blood by the winners.

(But when we come to Antony and Cleopatra – Auden’s favourite of these plays – Antony is a bored playboy, unable to break with his ‘Egyptian dish,’ and he is put away in straight sets by the man Gibbon described as a ‘crafty tyrant.’)

But his remarks on Prince Hal, later King Henry IV, really caught my eye.  He agrees with the observation of Falstaff that I do not think is sufficiently noticed: ‘Thou art essentially mad without seeming so.’

Hal has no self….He can be a continuous success because he can understand any situation, he can control himself, and he has physical and mental charm.  But he is a cold fish……The most brutal scene in Shakespeare is Henry’s wooing of Katherine. 

Whacko!  Prince Hal is all front – and nothing else.  Think of the seriously bad bastards in history, and then ask how apt that description might be for them.

Or try this for an exam question:

Sir John Falstaff is a ratbag, but if you want the real deal of the complete ratbag, go to Prince Hal.  Discuss.

Networking and identity politics are two terms I avoid.  They ooze bullshit.  But according to a piece in The Age this morning,the two terms may be related. 

The author refers to article ‘Why Women Build Less Powerful Relationships Than Men’.  It aimed to address ‘an additional layer’ –

….by looking at personal hesitation, relational morality and gendered modesty.  And, even more specifically, women who feel uncomfortable with the exploitative nature of networking, and women who often network with lower level peers due to lack of confidence in their own network contribution…

Later the author suggests that networking for women should be –

….curated in a way that is well informed, thoughtful and empathetic to women’s needs instead of the ‘utilitarian or instrumental’ events we’ve historically had to sit through….focussing on one-on-one relationships rather than larger team bonding exercises, which can be less intimidating to form and are more likely to be pursued with purpose.

As it seems to me, the inarticulate premise is that at least when it comes to networking, women are different to men, and have special needs.

I do not subscribe to that view, which looks at best unfortunate to me.

And I would like to get the views on ‘gendered modesty’ from Kylie Minogue or Taylor Swift.

Identity politics.

Two letters to The Age

PUBLISHED

Dear Editor,

I have trouble following the difference in the moral standing of a tradie bagging a duck with a shottie, and a surgeon taking a trout with a dry fly.  Nevertheless, I understand and respect the views of those who wish to ban duck hunting.  That is a matter on which reasonable minds may differ, but the case of the government that duck shooting is recreation for the people is dreadful nonsense. 

The leading recreation for the populus of ancient Rome was viewing gladiators at the Colosseum.  It reached its pinnacle with throwing Christians to the lions.  Later in England, hanging, drawing and quartering was a real day out for the masses.  Even under Queen Victoria, there was nothing like an afternoon out at the gallows at Tyburn.  The pick pockets had a picnic among a people entranced.

The possibilities are endless.  What about a hanging at half time at the Grand Final at the MCG to add a different sauce to the Four ‘n Twenty?

Yours truly,

NOT PUBLISHED

Dear Editor,

Australia Day has meant, at best, nothing to me for half my life. 

Other nations celebrate what they call ‘independence’.  We have never become independent of the English Crown, and the opening of a jail is hardly an occasion to celebrate.

The U S and France celebrate their nationhood on sacred days in July.  Each was, they say, the day they seized power from the old regime.  Each was the start of a period of shocking violence and killing and a form of civil war.  Of course, people of colour never got the benefit of all that guff about liberty, equality, and fraternity.

It was the same here after 26 January 1788 – except that here the white people took over under what they now concede were false imperialist pretenses, and more than two centuries later, we are still yet to come to terms with the victims of our most grievous wrongs.

How then can we celebrate such a day? 

Because we as a nation have not owned up or grown up.

Yours truly

Duck shooting – Australia Day